Five gold miners have been rescued in western Tanzania after
being trapped underground for 41 days, while 12 others are still missing,
police say.

The artisanal miners survived by eating roots, soil, frogs and cockroaches and
are receiving treatment at hospital.

The group had gone underground to rescue 11 other miners when they became
trapped, police said.
Many people search for gold in unregulated mines in remote areas of Tanzania in
the hope of becoming rich.

This is one of the longest periods that miners have remained trapped underground.
In Chile, 33 were rescued after 69 days in 2010 in an operation which gained
worldwide attention.

Efforts by local people to rescue the Tanzanian miners were abandoned last
month after about a week, as hopes of finding those faded, reports the BBC's
Alice Muthengi from the main city, Dar es Salaam.

But faint cries alerted other miners working nearby that the
group was still trapped underground, and search operations hurriedly resumed at
the mine in the north-western Shinyanga region, some 900km (500 miles) west of
Dares Salaam.

The 11 miners who were first trapped, and a colleague who went to search for
them, were still missing, and presumed dead, Justus Kamugisha, the police chief
for western Tanzania's Kahama district, told the BBC.

The rescued miners were trapped some 100m (300 ft) underground after a shaft
collapsed, the mining ministry said, the AFP news agency reports.

"The miners were very weak," Minister of Energy and Mines spokeswoman
Badra Masoud is quoted as saying.

"We survived by eating cockroaches, frogs and other insects as well as
drinking dirty water that seeped in from above," rescued miner Chacha
Wambura told state-owned television.

He added that "batteries of the torches... ran out and
we ended up in a cave that we earlier used as a store for our tools", AFP
reports.

Tanzanian gold miners rescued after 41 days underground "survived on insects"
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